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An Annotated Micro-history and Bibliography of the Houghton Shahnama

by Burzine Waghmar

In 1981 Stuart Welch and Martin Dickson published a study of [a] strange and amazing book in two volumes so huge and expensive as almost to be unreadable except in the best libraries. For a novel I am working on, I studied, this spring, the volumes of The Houghton Shahnameh (Harvard University Press) in the New York Public Library, and was astounded and delighted by the writers’ eccentric scholarship. By examining and re-examining pictures of countless kings, princesses, soldiers, heroes, servants, horses, camels, rabbits, demons, dragons, birds, balconies, gardens, flowers, trees, leaves, hunters, lions, lovers, dreams and dreamers. Dickson and Welch rebuilt a lost culture and restored a lost history to minute details. The delightful book, with its imaginative and eccentric scholarship, reminds me of Nabokov’s translations of and commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Ogin, and John Livingstone Lowe’s The Road to Xanadu.

— ORHAN PAMUK

So for a great Safavid manuscript the binder, the calligrapher, the illustrating painter or painters, the illuminator proper, the margin-gilder, and the ruler, with all the highly specialized rules of their crafts and with all the personal variety imprinted by the varying delicacies and strengths of various hands and minds, yet in their several mysteries all labored with kindred notions of the beautiful. It is awkward, but may convey meaning, to say that such a book becomes not so much a microcosm as a little macrocosm.

— ARTHUR UPHAM POPE

Persian book illuminations ‘are the most decorative and poetic’ among paintings of the Islamic world. Scholarly consensus contends that only in Persia does Islamic painting’s ‘strong, well-balanced pigments, fairytale landscapes and inner harmonies’ find their efflorescence whence its appeal, enthralling and enduring.1 The classic canons of Persian painting had fully evolved by the end of the fourteenth century, and the production of exquisite albums by the end of the second half of the sixteenth century, marked a watershed in the visual and decorative arts of Islam.

As mentioned in the scholium to this volume, the production of royally commissioned manuscripts by Timurid and Safavid dynasts of epics and legends, especially those of the Shahnama as artistic realia, enabled the preservation of this lyrical heritage. For a ruler sought, through the visual medium, to bolster his legitimacy and burnish his pedigree by a conscientious ‘mythification of the past’.2 This becomes patently manifest when, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, illustrated compositions reveal portrayals not inserted to aid or clarify textual narratives but also harken verisimilitudinous parallels between a perceived present and halcyon past. Indeed it was a given that the study of Persian literature and artistic reproduction of this canon was embodied in the farhang-i shahaneh or curriculum of all Persian princes from the Mongol epoch onwards.3

The Houghton Shahnama, aptly and amply regarded a Shahnama-yi shahi (‘King’s Book of Kings’), is superlative among extant, illuminated Shahnamas. It is the most impressive exemplum and, given the gripe in our documentary sources of early Safavid material culture, a ‘virtually portable art gallery in which the evolution of Safavi painting could be traced through the crucial years of the early 1520s to its maturity in the middle 1530s and beyond.’4

An Annotated Micro-history and Bibliography of the Houghton Shahnama 145

The Houghton or Tahmaspi Shahnama, engaged the workshop of that otherwise parsimonious bigot, Tahmasp I for more than a decade (1522-37) at whose atelier were ‘fifteen painters, two calligraphers, at least two illuminators, one or more book-binders, and countless gold-sprinklers, margin-rulers, and paper-burnishers’.5 Stuart Cary Welch and Martin Dickson concluded that of the fifteen, nine were major painters and five their assistants. Two additional paintings, on thicker paper, were finished sometime around 1540.6 Encased within its bejeweled, gilded leather binding, with a dedicatory rosette sans colophon, were 759 burnished folios (47 by 31.8 cm), of which 258 were full-page miniatures adorned by 30,000 poetic verses in rhythmic nasta‘liq calligraphy, with magnificent gold-flecked margins around a ruled area (26.9 by 17.7 cm).

It was gifted by the second Safavid shah, Tahmasp I (r. 1524-76), to the eleventh Ottoman sultan, Selim ‘the Sot’ II7 (r. 1566-74) with a Qur’an reputedly penned by Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and fourth caliph;8 a pavilion-tent topped with gold depicting painted landscapes; twenty silk carpets complemented by textiles worth 164,000 gold ducats; and a pear-shaped Badakhshan ruby encased in a jewel-box plus two pearls weighing 10 miskal (40 drams) among other precious objects transported on thirty-four camels, as an accession gift for ‘a copy of Firdowsi’s Shahnameh – often with the addition of a contemporary Shahnameh extolling the patron-king – was so indispensable to a ruler’s library that it might almost be considered part of majestic regalia.’9 ‘It is,’ as David Roxburgh reminds us, ‘hard to imagine two more potent symbols of Safavid ideology or to comprehend the value of each – the first [Alid Qur’an], if authentic, was exceedingly rare, the second [Tahmaspi Shahnama], unequaled before or since in number of illustrations and the expense of its material and labor’. They exhibited ‘Tahmasb’s twin language of Irano-Islamic authority.’10

Both Ottomans and foreigners later recounted the opulence of this ‘propitious’ presentation, nothing if not orchestrated, where Safavid Persians, putative legatees of the Pishdadians, via a honourable detour through the House of Ali, reminded these Anatolian arrivistes and – militarily – superior Sunnis, of their regnal prerogative.11 The brutal truth was that it was Tahmasp’s ‘ransom to maintain his country’s peace’ and preserve the ‘laboriously concluded’ treaty of Amasya (1555) which, a decade on, still held and would – after a renegotiating of its terms in 1562 – until 1575.12 The iconography of these ‘acceptable gifts’ in the Şehname-Selim Han is decidedly triumphalist: the composition recognisably sets the Safavids in their station, and does not belie the correct, courtly one-upmanship between two Muslim antagonists.13 As Captain Adolphus Slade, a British naval officer who travelled in the Ottoman realms three centuries later cautioned, ‘Pride is necessary to ensure respect from the Osmanley [Ottoman], who ascribes even common politeness to submission.’14

The Safavid entourage of 320 officials and 400 merchants, with 1,700 pack animals, led by the governor of Yerevan, Shahquli Sultan Ustajlu, initially reached Istanbul, and then proceeded to Edirne in state, where the Sultan was wintering, and presented itself to him on February 16, 1568 (= A.H. 17 Shaban, 975). It was officially chronicled and illustrated in not only the sovereign’s history, the Selimnameh, but also attested by the then Hapsburg embassy in a diplomatic despatch from the Sublime Porte.15 It has been doubted if the manuscript’s antecedents, as suggested by Welch and Dickson, can be attributed to Isma‘il I as a homecoming present for his eight-year-old son and crown prince, Tahmasp, who had resided from infancy at Herat, as a nominal governor aged two till he turned six, to Tabriz. His Herat interlude has been rightly compared to a Roman’s growing years in Athens.16 That Tahmasp, a sometime student of the most renowned Tabrizi maitre, Sultan Muhammad, could have ordered its creation upon his coronation in 1524, cannot be discounted.17

From 1568, almost three hundred years, ‘a blessing to posterity’, the volume remained in Ottoman Istanbul until it reached France towards the end of the nineteenth century.18 An attestation during its Istanbuli interregnum is from the era of Selim III (r. 1789-1807), who commanded that Turkish synopses foregrounding the context of the illustrated fables and its 60,000 archaic, sesquipedalian verses be written on ‘protective sheets interleaved to face the miniatures’, and inserted into the codex, one for each of

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its 258 miniatures. This was undertaken at the behest of the sovereign between May 1800 and April 1801 by Mehmed Arif Efendi (1757/58-1829-33?), ‘Head Keeper of his Majesty’s Guns’ at the Palace Treasury, who was also a poet and court historian of considerable learning and standing.19

Its westward sojourn remains untraceable but what we do now know is that it came into the possession of Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845-1934).20 This was just before 1903 for its new owner lent it to the Exposition des Arts Musulmans held at the Pavillon de Marsal of the Union Centrale (later Musée) des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, April 21 - June 30, 1903.21 His heir and another distinguished collector, Baron Maurice de Rothschild (1881-1957) subsequently inherited it. It was surmised that, save Sir Thomas Arnold (1864-1930), no other western scholar had ever seen it in the intervening years.22 The Rothschilds, in fact, denied all scholarly access.23 Following Baron Maurice’s demise, his son and grandfather’s namesake, Baron Edmond (1926-97), with a view to wooing chiefly American purchasers, put it up for sale alongside other heirlooms. It was one among several artefacts stolen by the Nazis after the fall of France; the Rothschilds were able to recover it, through the good offices of the Allied Command, after the war.24 The rest followed suit and was reminisced by Stuart Cary Welch in a Festschrift for Martin Dickson, almost a decade after their joint collaboration on the Houghton Shahnama and a year prior to the latter’s passing.25

Welch, a young assistant during the 1950s to the Honorary Keeper of Islamic Art at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, Erich Schroeder, recalled being queried over luncheon by that museum’s Director, John Coolidge, of any major art works for a friend ‘who wants one; and he does not care what it is.’26 Welch promptly pointed out that the Rothschild Shahnama was, since 1954 on sale for $360,000, at Rosenberg & Stiebel’s midtown Manhattan (32 E. 57th St.) gallery.27 The said friend was the bibliophile, benefactor and collector, Arthur Amory Houghton, Jr (1906-90).28 A Harvard alumnus, it was Houghton, curator of Rare Books at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC (1940-42) and principal funder of Harvard’s Houghton Library (est. 1942), the nation’s first climate-controlled, varsity library for rare books and manuscripts, who bought this Shahnama in November 1959. Houghton had inspected it along with Welch earlier in the year in Manhattan. The former felt he simply must have it and the latter ‘hoped – even assumed – that he would give it to Harvard as the “crown jewel” of his earlier gift, the Houghton Library.’ The memoirs of Thomas Hoving (d. 2009), a former director of the Metropolitan Museum, are suggestive thus lending more than a smidgen of credence to Welch.29 It is imperative to highlight Houghton’s passion for books and book collecting in light of what occurred down the years.

Welch next volunteered to research and publish it to which Houghton ‘reacted enthusiastically.’30 He was fortunate to elicit the co-operation of Martin Dickson, a Princeton Persianist with a majestic command of primary and secondary sources of the early medieval Muslim world from Anatolia as far afield as Xinjiang. It was agreed at a New York meeting chaired by Houghton and flanked by an array of designers and publishers in April 1961, to create a book that ‘would exemplify the highest standards of American design, typography, printing, and binding.’31 Houghton would subvent its paper- and plate-production, proof-corrections, printing and binding, with other duties borne by both authors, and staff at the Fogg Museum and Harvard University Press. It was decided to limit the edition to 750 copies, 600 of which were made available for sale.32 Harvard University Press, on behalf of the Fogg Art Museum, eventually published the Houghton Shahnama in ‘actual size’ in 1981.

Barely three years had passed than Houghton decided to disbound it so that some illuminated folios could be displayed on silk mats at New York’s Grolier Club (1962; past president 1955-57); M Knoedler and Co. (1968); Pierpont Morgan Library (1968); and Asia House Gallery (1970); besides private viewings at Houghton’s Manhattan residence (130 E. 62nd Street), and Wye River plantation, near Queenstown, Maryland, where these matted paintings hung in, naturally, the Persian room.33 The manuscript was made available to Welch in June 1962 for extended study at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Subsequently Coolidge arranged for Dickson and Welch to have complete sets of prints of the binding and miniatures alongside photocopies of the text.34 It must have been the last time ever that


this Shahnama was in toto. But it ought be pointed out that the volume had to be unsewn for preparing colour and sepia plates.35 This was done by an expert bookbinder at the Morgan Library, who recalled snipping away during her ‘lunch hours’ and that none of the paintings were cut as they were bound in singly with those ‘overlaid sheets’ by Turkish librarians. By 1965 all prints were ready, one for each of the numbered edition of 750 sets, and stored in wooden boxes at Cambridge. It now only awaited the translation and commentary by Welch and Dickson.36

Even when the project was on the drawing-board, Houghton ex mero motu took apart the codex in the late 1960s without giving a fig about the ‘[i]mpassioned criticism from many quarters [which] greeted the dismembering and scattering of a document of such value and of such intrinsic beauty, for not only was the complete ensemble destroyed but with it, the possibility of studying and recording the subtle, mathematical, rhythmic interrelationships in the art of the Persian manuscript that have only recently begun to be addressed.’ Hoving recalled Houghton as ‘conspiratorial, manipulative and mercurial.’37

For eleven years Houghton owned ‘one of the supreme illustrated manuscripts of any period or culture and among the greatest works of art in the world’ which, if ‘an Italian project of equivalent magnitude or significance would have to have been a national epic such as the Divine Comedy of Dante and to have included in one single, monumental and profusely illustrated volume the masterpieces of a host of Renaissance artists such as Leonardo, Bellini, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Corregio and more, and their pupils.’38 The art critic and journalist, Eleanor Munro, in her detailed discussion of this Houghton histoire unexaggeratedly exclaimed, ‘The work was unique, as complex and coherent as, some claimed, the Sistine Chapel.’39

In 1970, Houghton donated, as a tax-deductible gift, 76 text folios with 78 paintings to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was followed up with a benefaction of half a million dollars. The Met held non-profit status and its centennial fell in 1970, the very year Houghton assumed chairmanship of its board.40 It is now known that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) challenged Houghton when he filed his returns claiming an appreciable tax return on the valuation computed against this donation.41

The Metropolitan Museum next, felicitously albeit belatedly, mounted an exhibition of these miniatures as the American recognition of the 2,500th imperial Iranian celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971. The exhibition, displaying ninety-eight pages with further donations by Houghton, opened on May 4, 1972 – and the world came to marvel at this masterpiece on the eve of Tahmasp’s three hundredth and ninety-sixth death anniversary.42 Stuart Cary Welch, yielding to the ‘museum’s sudden request’, prepared its catalogue, a ‘greatly condensed account’, in a fortnight.43 The exhibition ran until October 31, 1972 in which 75 miniatures from Houghton’s bequest were put on display.44 A film, Tales from a Book of Kings: The Houghton Shah-nameh was also conceived and produced by the consultative chairman of the Metropolitan’s Islamic department, Richard Ettinghausen (1966-79). This was widely broadcast in the following years at United States Information Service (USIS) centres abroad.45 Subsequently the exhibition travelled to The Corning Museum of Glass, November 17, 1973 – January 31, 1974 and The Baltimore Museum of Art, February 12 – March 31, 1974. This, actually, was a first as well for both galleries exhibited those not displayed at The Met in 1972, namely, the later works executed by Aqa Mirak and Mir Mussavar and not those of Sultan Muhammad and his followers.46

Houghton’s ‘bafflingly destructive’ streak manifested itself when seven folios sold in fifteen minutes at Christie’s, London for £785,000 ($1,371,624) in November, 1976 with a single illustration going for £280,000 ($484,000): a record price for not only any Persian but also Islamic work of art ever thus putting that country’s art finally and financially at par with great western works.47 The IRS was on Houghton’s case and his hand was forced to hold ‘a public sale that would establish the actual market value of the individual paintings.’48 It vindicated Houghton’s monetary claim against his donation to the Met and that he had not inflated the price. Even prior to this, Houghton had embarked on a spree of divesting his artefacts and assets towards ‘accumulating both capital and tax credits.’ Around the


same time as the gift to the Met, Houghton sold his prized Gutenberg Bible to the renowned rare-book dealer, Hans Kraus. It changed hands for an undisclosed sum.49

Audi alteram partem. A glimpse into Houghton’s thinking was the one-off statement he ever placed on record:50

What will be the eventual disposition of the large remaining number of miniatures I cannot say at this time. Of one thing I feel sure, which is that they should not all be in one place. The risks of destruction by fire, war, civil disturbance, and theft are too great. In addition, I would like to see them somewhat dispersed so that they can be seen and appreciated by the largest number of persons over the long future …

Abolala Soudavar cuts through the cant and reminds enraged engagés that:51

One cannot evoke the principal of integrity for a work of art without invoking preservation. … The only way to conserve the integrity of a manuscript is never to open it. … Once a manuscript is unbound, the matter of the location of individual pages, whether in Tehran or in New York, becomes secondary. The primary focus should be on preservation, especially from calamities. To leave 258 of the greatest paintings in the whole realm of Persian painting in one place is to incur the risk of losing them all in one disastrous calamity. … But a more important danger lurking for illustrated manuscripts is the danger of defacement, or total destruction, by iconoclasts. Many manuscripts have been defaced in the past. Closer to our times, [i]f illustrated manuscripts are not destroyed by religious zealots, the chances are that they will be preempted, since so many images with female figures are not allowed to be seen in Iran nowadays.52

Thomas Hoving, whose warts-and-all interview in 2002 has escaped the notice of Islamic art historians, may well have provided what will become the definitive explanation for what forced Houghton’s hand:53

“He wanted the facsimile published and it wasn’t going nearly as quickly as he wanted. So in frustration – perhaps it was pique, who knows – he pulled the book out of Harvard, brought it down to New York, and proceeded to do what he did with it there.” … A prevailing assumption, one that Hoving did not dispute, is that had the IRS accepted as true value Houghton’s estimate of the material he had already donated, the remaining plates may have been given at some point to the Metropolitan Museum as well. … “I was flatly opposed to the breaking up of the book in any fashion,” Hoving told me. “I confronted Arthur physically, personally, on the matter, but he was determined to do this, and he was the chairman of our board of trustees, after all; so at the end of the day we wound up with these fabulous plates, which our experts assured me were the very best of them all.” … “When the IRS disallowed Arthur’s claim, he became petrified that the government was going to investigate everything that he was involved with, in particular that they would look into several of his charitable foundations, which we now know had acted as conduits for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War. That, I firmly, believe, was the concern that drove this highly intelligent man to do the impulsive thing he did with the rest of the Shahnameh. It was a totally stupid act on his part to break up this magnificent book and scatter the plates to the four winds, but he allowed his petty fears to take control of his common sense. You have to realize that this was a very arch, very patrician man who was unbelievably paranoid, kind of spooky to tell you the truth, and he had it in him to take offense at anything. What I believe he wanted to say to these people was, ‘If you don’t believe what I am telling you these plates are worth, then I will show you what they are worth.’”


That 1976 Christie’s sale, it must be reminded, occurred on the heels of an unsuccessful proposal when Houghton had proffered the remaining volume consisting of one hundred and eighty miniatures for the sum of $28.5mn, ‘barely the price of a Lockheed bomber’, to Persia.54 Empress Farah, reminiscing years later, stated, ‘[W]e couldn’t pay this sum in those days.’55 The deal fell through ‘in a series of buffooneries and mixed messages’, despite protracted negotiations right through 1975, between Houghton and Farah’s factotums. A peeved Persian’s pishkash, rather the absence of it, allegedly, stymied the arrangement for the said apparatchik in the Shahbanou’s secretariat expected his bakshish to be nothing less than $1.5mn failing which the transaction would come undone.56 There is reason to believe that Houghton, even at this stage in March 1975, was not entirely enthusiastic about selling this prized possession, whose viewing during a bout of shingles had afforded him ‘consolation in his pain’. But what a pathetic plaint by the consort of a monarch, ‘a modern replay of Cyrus at Lydia’, whose kingdom’s oil revenues multiplied nineteen times from $2.4bn to $17.4bn between 1972 and 1974; and one who, in a wind-swept wilderness, had convened a five and a half hour banquet which remains, in successive editions of the Guinness Book of World Records, the most expensive in modern history!57

Inasmuch as the aesthetically inclined Empress, a former architecture student, must be acknowledged as a patroness of arts and crafts, including the Shiraz Arts Festival (1967-77), her avant-garde tastes led her to prioritize purchasing mostly modish creations by Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol. All of these 400 plus works, to the tune of $3bn, remain stacked on pull-out racks in the storeroom of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art (est. 1977), since Persian puritans ousted the Pahlavis more than a generation ago.58 How portentous then to look back at a 1975 Economist issue’s cover of a scene from the Houghton Shahnama, where wise men plead with Zal to intercede and reason with the Shah. Muhammad Reza Pahlavi – bereft of his farr-i izadi since that night’s Belshazzarian banquet in Persepolis – rested his case with history five years later.59

Stuart Cary Welch recalled another missed opportunity regarding the equally ill-fated Demotte Shahnama passed up by H Khan Monif, a New York based art dealer, when offered in Paris felt, ‘its quality did not warrant its “excessive” price (a price that was, in fact, a fraction of what a single page would bring today).’60 Persian petty-fogging, typically, carried the day. The Pahlavis, however, honourably redeemed and returned home their ousted predecessors, the Qajars, whose 63 paintings in the Amery Collection were the largest and most extensive outside Persia until 1969. Empress Farah was instrumental in purchasing this cache for ‘something like $3 million’, before it fell into the hands of Sotheby’s, to form the nucleus of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Persian art at the newly opened Nigaristan Museum, Shiraz, 1975.61

Enthused by this profitable auction at Christie’s and by further private sales, Houghton next dispensed with approximately 40 folios offered at $275,000-$375,000 through the Bond Street dealer, Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd. The British Rail Pension Fund bought four paintings and subsequently sold them in 1996. All four were snapped up spectacularly: Faridun’s entry into the palace to strike down the tyrant, Zahhak (£419,500); an enthroned Kay Qubad listening to Rustum (£793,500); Manuchihr at the start of his reign (£535,500); and Rustum deflecting a boulder intended to kill him (£397,500).62 In an October 1988 sale, Christie’s sold fourteen folios for £986,800. That year Houghton arranged for what was left of a ravaged yet coveted codex to be deposited at Lloyd’s Bank, London. In that vault was deposited a box containing remaining paintings carefully encased within rag-board mats prepared by conservators at the Morgan Library. They were then specially boxed and in a separate box was placed the binding and text pages.63 By the time Houghton died in 1990, 62 illustrated leaves had made their way into private and public hands.

So would Dickson and Welch’s labour of love, those 600 lavish, two-volume copies which, following nearly two decades of ‘delight, struggle, horror, and anticipation’, saw the light of an unrelieved day in 1981. The erstwhile crown’s advance order of 20 copies stood rescinded by tasteless, Tehrani turbans.64 One hundred copies had been set aside for the Fogg Museum and Arthur Houghton to distribute among


deserving libraries and educational institutions. Both Dickson and Welch received twenty-five copies each in lieu of their khweshkarih over some sixteen years.65

To herald its anticipated publication, exhibitions were envisaged on both sides of the Atlantic. Agnew’s, where the London auction had occurred, held a small viewing of seventeen folios at their Old Bond Street gallery in the summer of 1979.66 A far grander exhibition opened concomitantly at the British Library, August 10 – October 28, 1979. By the time it opened on December 16 1979, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, American diplomats were hostages in their Tehran chancery stormed and occupied by incensed Iranians, shysters doubling up as students, in November, 1979. A Time magazine review began its piece declaring: ‘In hindsight, the glories of kings are apt to depend on the available talent. All the last Shah could rake up by way of a court artist was Andy Warhol. Four hundred years before, his predecessors were more fortunate.’67

Steeped in Firdawsian gham and gloom, the exhibition continued to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, March 20, 1980. Its final opening at the aforementioned, where Welch served as Honorary Assistant Keeper (1956), Lecturer in Fine Arts (1960), and Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art until his retirement (1976-95), was a cruel irony: the Iranian new year or Noruz, augured no spring but an acrimonious season of distrust as Iran imploded within, and some months later, exploded without, on its western front:68

Ahead of us lies war and endless strife, Such that my failing heart despairs of life. … Alas for their great crown and throne, for all The royal splendor destined now to fall, To be fragmented by the Arabs’ might; The stars decree for us defeat and flight.

Following the flight of the Pahlavis and its haute bourgeoisie in tow, mayhem and massacre, logically, followed.

The game, next time round, was played for higher stakes. Following Houghton’s death – exactly a decade after the Shah and a year on after Khomeini – his son, Arthur Amory Houghton III (b. 1940), decided to sell the partial codex consisting of 118 illustrations, 501 text pages and binding for approximately £13mn ($20 mn).69 Qataris and Emiratis, now voracious (culture) vultures had not yet initiated their frenzied appropriation of ‘Islamic heritage’. Arab one-upmanship, those meretricious museums now in Doha and Abu Dhabi, were still two decades away.70 Just what exactly would this partial volume be worth eluded both seller and buyer(s). No buyer was available as no price could truly be estimated.

An Etonian’s pragmatism paved the Houghton Shahnama’s prodigal homecoming: Oliver Hoare, an Islamic art dealer of standing, was ‘appalled by the manuscript’s dismemberment’ and was approached by Houghton III to scout for prospective buyers ‘who would vow to keep the text and the remaining 118 miniatures intact.’ Houghton shared Hoare’s determination to prevent further cannibalization. It was an admirable instance of a collector and dealer committed to preservation.71 The Houghton estate’s asking price elicited little interest. A suggestion that wealthy, diasporic Persians could raise funds was a non-starter. It is to Hoare that the idea of a swap must be credited. And, given discretion, patience, and English tact when handling prickly Persians, it paid off – bartering appealed to their bazaari acuity and they ran true to form.

Hoare got wind that the Iran Cultural Heritage Organisation (est. 1985) was keen on repatriating works of art.72 His initial, cautious missive to its director was that disbursement by disposal of objects that ‘didn’t fulfill a role in their cultural plans’ need not be ruled out. He realized that Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), then closed, contained modern originals quite unlike elsewhere and that it could, in principle, sell anything from ‘André Derain to the New York School paintings’ but for the fact that Iranian law prohibited the sale of any national art holdings. Hoare was enthused when Tehran requested Chahryar Adle, the recently deceased Paris-based art historian and archaeologist, to meet and


discuss this in person. For Adle told Hoare that the Shahnama ‘was number one on the list of things the Cultural Heritage Organisation wanted to get back.’ After several false starts and stalemates, ‘politically immensely dangerous … discussions in Iran went on for two years.’73 It was tacitly agreed towards the end of 1993 by a high-level committee of no less than the Supreme Leader (rahbar), Ali Khamenei, then President Hashemi Rafsanjani and, instrumentally, Vice-President Hassan Habibi (d. 2013) as well as Mehdi Hojjat, founding chief (ICHO). It required clearing at the very top what with a British dealer and an American seller. While not acrimonious, the negotiations were, in a word, fraught.74

Arthur Amory Houghton III, like his Iranian counterparts, was no less nervous. A former diplomat, he was, at the time, a senior staff member at the White House. Hoare, whose discretion was beyond reproach, erred just once by telephoning Houghton at his office to say that ‘the Iranians are really interested’. It had been pre-arranged that Iran and the codex would be coded Spain and an orange shipment on open communication lines. Houghton henceforth never used his White House phone.75

Hoare put it to the Persians to close the deal, which they did in June 1994, by agreeing to an one-off exchange of the remaining manuscript with Willem de Kooning’s Lady No. 3, an abstract expressionist nude long stored away, considered tasteless and unIslamic, and which would never be exhibited by the regime.76 Hoare pragmatically suggested reciprocal arbitration values of $20mn be affixed to it as well as the Houghton Shahnama. On July 26 1994, Hoare formally purchased the Shahnama from the Houghton estate. Twenty-fours later, Tahmasp’s tome, in seven wooden crates set out from its Lloyd’s Bank vault, London, for Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris. It was on its way home. That very day, July 27, it was inspected and confirmed by Chahryar Adle and Akbar Tajwidi in the presence of Iranian embassy and other officials in France.77 On Thursday, July 28 1994/Mordad 6, 1373, the checked crates departed for Vienna’s Schwechat airport. An Iranian government B-727, previously lavishly kitted and purchased by the Shah from Henry Ford II in 1974, had already landed and was sitting on the tarmac containing Lady No. 3. A Zurich-based dealer, among other intermediaries, was on hand to verify her. Mehdi Hojjat, principal co-ordinator aboard the presidential B-727, supervised the swap for he accompanied the crates being unloaded and reloaded in a secure van. The van, as Souren Melikian reported, was chained during uplift to the aircraft.78 The afternoon atmosphere was swift, secure and skittish.

Tahmasp returned to Tehran via Vienna albeit in reduced circumstances.79 Dignified, given how its former Ottoman owners, humiliated twice, had retreated from Vienna’s outskirts (1529, 1683). It was argued, with some justification, that it was repatriated for a song, and that the mutilated codex ‘was worth at least 20 paintings by de Kooning, and that the Houghton Foundation had been the loser in exchanging the work for one painting by de Kooning, and that the Iranian government had actually recovered the Shahnameh gratis.’ Rather rich coming from the former empress who crossly queried, ‘If they were really interested in Shahnameh, couldn’t they pay $6m and keep De Kooning’s painting? … [It] is the sole exchange they’ve done so far and I hope it remains the last one.’ Alireza Sami-azar, MOCA director (1998-2005), lamented losing the painting but regarded, in the final analysis, that had the authorities not done so, there was every chance the remaining 118 miniatures would have ended up in sales room only to be spirited away into obscurity forever. The de Kooning would remain as a whole despite changing proprietorship.80

The Swiss dealer on the Vienna tarmac that day, Doris Ammann, it was later revealed, sold Lady No. 3 to entertainment mogul, David Geffen for approximately $20mn. It earned the Houghton estate $9.5mn which proceeds, as had been willed during his lifetime, were earmarked for his fourth widow, Nina Rodale Houghton.81 (They had, after all, married in 1972, the very year of the Met exhibition.) Willem de Kooning’s Lady No. 3 subsequently changed hands when hedge fund billionaire, Steven Cohen, bought it from a Manhattan dealer, Larry Gagosian, for about $137.5mn in 2006.82

The Houghton Shahnama has rested its case with history. But it still made the headlines in the two decades since 30 of its 118 miniatures were displayed at gallery no. 9, Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary


Art (MOCA). A single page sold at Sotheby’s, London on October 11, 2006 for $1.7mn (£904,000) and was bought by the Aga Khan Museum, Geneva.83 What was just as newsworthy was that the Iranians loaned to the Italians some of the Houghton Shahnama illuminations among other artefacts, including from the Ardabil shrine, for an exhibition jointly curated by Sheila Canby and Jon Thompson, ‘Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran, 1501-1576’, at New York’s Asia Society, October 16, 2003 – January 18, 2004 and the Museo Poldi Pezzoli and Palazzo Reale, Milan, February 23 – June 28, 2004. A budget deficit led to its cancellation at The British Museum, London.84 The Tahmaspi Shahnama did not cross the Atlantic but short of the Alps where it was possible for visitors to appreciate ten of its paintings alongside one from a private collection in Vaduz and three from the N D Khalili Collection, London. Not only was this laudable but far more enriching because the Milan stint was thematically, not chronologically, organized as New York.85

Stuart Cary Welch died in 2008.86 His descendants arranged with Sotheby’s, London to auction his impressive Islamic art holdings. Some of these objects were exhibited, April 1-5, 2011 and auctioned the following day. Pride of place among his collectanea was a leaf of the Houghton Shahnama Welch had purchased at the Agnew’s auction of 1977. The painting, Faridun in the guise of a dragon testing his sons (folio 42v.) was, according to Welch’s handwritten notes on the frame’s backboard, ‘the costliest acquisition I had ever made. Terrible effort, but successful (a Triumph!) –’87 The painting’s asking price range was £2-3mn (2.3-3.5mn euros). The present writer was in the room when it sold for £7.4mn ($12.2mn) on April 6, 2011.88 At thrice its pre-sale figure, it set a world record for a single Islamic lot. Total sales from that day’s Cary Collection (including buyer’s premium) stood at £20.9mn ($34.4mn).89

On November 1, 2011 fifteen galleries devoted to Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum reopened. This south wing, within its Fifth Avenue building, was closed for major refurbishment in May 2003. The galleries, now expanded by 4000 square feet, display almost 1,200 artefacts in all media from Islam’s inception, the seventh century, to the nineteenth century across a floor space covering 19,000 square feet. They constitute the most impressive and extensive holdings of Muslim art in North America.90 Houghton’s 78 paintings still remain the crown jewels of the Met and are now on display in the newly dedicated gallery 462, Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Gallery of Safavid and Later Iranian Art (16th-20th centuries). Twelve folios are on display at any given time along the southern end of the gallery. These are replaced through ‘rotations’ every four to six months.91 This historical opening could not have come at a more appropriate time, a period when the image of Muslims merits restitution in public discourse. It was fitting that this red-letter event saw the publishing of a facsimile edition of the Houghton Shahnama including, for the first time, all of its 258 paintings reproduced in colour and in near original size (39.3 by 26.7 cm; cf. original 47 by 31.8 cm).92

Two Persians, Ebadollah Bahari and Dalia Sofer, remain deeply attached to their Perso-Islamic culture. Both separately yearned in print for the day when Shah Tahmasp’s magnum opus might be collated for posterity’s consumption. Bahari wrote, ‘It is hoped that some museum or major institution will undertake to produce facsimiles or a good reproduction of the whole book, with all its illustrations in place, in order not only to show how the original work must have looked but also to assist future scholars in studying and evaluating the art and artists of the period.’93

This, happily, came to pass for Sheila Canby concluded her introduction stating, ‘Its folios will never be reunited, but at least they can meet again as pages in a modern book.’94

A Persian plea was realised and it was America that fulfilled – and redeemed – this realisation.


References Just as copious as the notes accompanying the scholium at the outset of this volume, the student

of Shahnama studies in South and Central Asia as well as present-day Iran, otherwise unable to access published sources, is presented here an exhaustive survey of the extant literature.

1. Richard Ettinghausen and Marie Lukens Swietochowski, Islamic Painting, New York, 1983, pp 2, 6 (repr. of special issue on Islamic painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36, 2, 1978, pp 3-48.) A sound grounding may be obtained from the following: Ernst Kühnel, ‘History of Miniature Painting and Drawing’, in A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present, vol. VI, Arthur U Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (eds.), London and New York, 1939, pp 1829-97; repr. in op. cit., vol. V, Tokyo, 1964; 3rd ed., Tehran, 1977; J Michael Rogers, The Spread of Islam, The Making of the Past, Oxford, 1976; Richard Ettinghausen, ‘The Categorization of Persian Painting’, in Studies in Judaism and Islam presented to S. D. Goitein, S Morag et al. (eds.), Jerusalem, 1981, pp 55-63; Basil Gray, ‘The Pictorial Arts in the Timurid Period’, and ‘The Arts in the Safavid Period’, in The Cambridge History of Iran: the Timurid and Safavid Periods, vol. 6, Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (eds.), Cambridge, 1986; repr. 2006, pp 843-912; Ernst Grube and Eleanor Sims, ‘Painting’, in The Arts of Persia, R W Ferrier (ed.), New Haven and London, 1989, pp 200-23; Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, ‘The Arts in Iran and Central Asia under the Timurids and their Contemporaries’, and ‘The Arts in Iran under the Safavids and Zands’, in eidem, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250-1800, Pelican History of Art, New Haven and London, 1994; corr. repr. 1995, pp 55-69, 165-82; Oleg Grabar, ‘Persian miniatures: illustrations or paintings’, in The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, Georgio Levi Della Vida Biennial Conference Proceedings 13, Richard Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (eds.), Cambridge, 1998, pp 199-217; Sheila Canby, The Golden Age of Persian Art, 1501-1722, London, 1999; rev. repr. 2008; Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. XII, Supplement, s.v. ‘Iran viii. Art and Architecture’ (by Priscilla Soucek), pp 448-53; M M Ashrafi and Priscilla Soucek, ‘Arts of the Book and Painting’, in History of Civilizations of Central Asia: the Age of Achievement, A.D. 750 to the end of the fifteenth century, vol. IV, pt. 2, C E Bosworth and M S Asimov (eds.), Paris, 2000; repr. New Delhi, 2003, pp 461-505; Jonathan Bloom, ‘The Introduction of Paper to the Islamic Lands and the Development of the Illuminated Manuscript’, Muqarnas 17, 2000, pp 17-23; Yves Porter, ‘From the “Theory of the Two Qalams” to the “Seven Principles of Painting”: Theory, Terminology, and Practice in Classical Persian Painting’, Muqarnas 17, 2000, pp 109-18; R Pakbaz, ‘Painting: to the end of the Safavid Period’, in The Splendour of Iran: the Islamic Period, vol. III, C Parham (ed.), London, 2001, pp 70-97; Oleg Akimushkin, ‘Arts of the Book, painting and calligraphy: Iran and north-western Central Asia’, in History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Development in Contrast from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, vol. V, C Adle et al. (eds.), Paris, 2003, pp 555-85; Giovanni Curatola, ‘Timeless figures: Persian Miniatures’, in The Art and Architecture of Persia, Gianroberto Scarcia and Giovanni Curatola (eds.), New York, 2007, pp 191-216; Adel Adamova, Mediaeval Persian Painting: the Evolution of an Artistic Vision, J Michael Rogers (tr. and ed.), Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lecture Series SOAS 2003, New York, 2008; eadem, ‘Persian painting from the 14th to the early 20th centuries: a short history’, in Adel Adamova, Persian Manuscripts, Paintings and Drawings: from the 15th to the early 20th century in the Hermitage Collection, S Hartly (ed.), J Michael Rogers (tr.), London, 2012, pp 11-37; Michael Barry, ‘The Islamic book and its illustration’, in Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum: Arts of the Book and Calligraphy, Carol LaMotte and Shannon de Viviès (tr.), Margaret Graves (ed.), Istanbul, 2010, pp 238-55; Oleg Grabar, The Hidden Eye: An Approach to Persian Painting, The Annual Noruz Lecture Series, Bethesda MD, 2003, http://fis-iran.org/en/programs/noruz lectures/persian-painting; Grabar’s swansong, a volume for the connoisseur, containing superbly reproduced large-scale, colour plates, Masterpieces of Islamic Art: the Decorative Page from 8th to the 17th Century, Allayne Pullen (tr.) in assoc. with First Edition Translations, Munich and New York, 2009. Islamics lacked a one-volume philosophical approach until Oliver Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics: an Introduction, The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys, Edinburgh, 2004. But see Oleg Grabar, ‘Toward an Aesthetic of Persian Painting’, in The Art of Interpreting: Papers in Art History from The Pennsylvania State University, vol. IX,


Susan Scott (ed.), Univ. Park PA, 1995, pp 129-39 (= idem, Islamic Visual Culture 1100-1800: Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, vol. 2, Variorum collected studies series CS825, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2006, pp 213-51). Grabar, art. cit., 1998 is an alternate version of Grabar, art. cit., 1995. For valuable insights on aesthetics also see Eric Schroeder, Persian Miniatures in the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge MA, 1942. It merits recalling here what J Michael Rogers, perceptively pointed out when concluding his review, Bibliotheca Orientalis XXIX, 3-4, May-June 1972, p 240, of Sir Thomas Arnold, Painting in Islam: a Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture, B W Robinson (introd.), Oxford, 1928; New York, 1965: ‘The great difficulty is that Muslim aesthetics, or the aesthetic foundations of individual schools of Muslim painting, must largely be deduced from the works themselves. If Arnold failed to realise this, he was at least in good company and none of his successors has show great success; the problem, indeed, may be insoluble.’ This, among other features, is in J Michael Rogers, The Uses of Anachronism: on Cultural and Methodological Diversity in Islamic Art, An Inaugural Lecture delivered on 17 October 1991, London, 1994. Rogers was the Nasser David Khalili Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology in the University of London (1990-2000), the first chair in the British Isles, when subvented at SOAS by its alumnus and benefactor, Dr Nasser David Khalili, a scholar-collector of no mean repute who also possesses, at the time of writing, ten miniatures of the Houghton Shahnama. Specialised entries on a range of topics covering Persian painting may be consulted in The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., Jane Turner (ed.), New York, 1996; Encyclopædia Iranica, http://www.iranicaonline.org; and Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd and 3rd edns. It is not possible to marshal all references, including secondary European sources, for that is not the purpose on hand. A representative culling, as a compromise, is provided for South Asian and Middle Eastern readers who, as Anglophones elsewhere, chiefly rely on English materials.

2. Sheila Blair, ‘The Development of the Illustrated Book in Iran’, Muqarnas 10, 1993 [Essays in honor of Oleg Grabar contributed by his Students], p 273. A subsidiarium published earlier to this Festschrift was Wheeler Thackston, Album Prefaces and other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters, Studies and Sources in Islamic Art and Architecture-Supplements to Muqarnas 10 Boston, 2001; repr. 2014. Gene Garthwaite, The Persians, The Peoples of Asia, Oxford 2005; repr. 2007, p 170 states how Tahmasp’s completion of this project initiated by his father ‘legitimized the ruler within the tradition of Iranian rulership through identification with the Shahnamah’s mythical rulers.’ Also see two succinct prologues and epilogues respectively by J Michael Rogers, ‘Arts of Islam’, in idem, The Arts of Islam: Treasures from the Nasser D Khalili Collection Sydney, 2007; rev. exp. ed. Abu Dhabi, 2008, pp 15-22; and Peter Avery, ‘The Shaping of Iran’s Character’, in The Splendour of Iran: the Islamic Period, vol. III, C Parham (ed.), London, 2001, pp 380-82.

3. Marshall G S Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization: the Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, vol. 3, Chicago, 1974; repr. 1977, p 33; Abolala Soudavar, ‘The Early Safavids and their Cultural Interactions with Surrounding States’, in Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, Nikki Keddie and Rudi Matthee (eds.), Seattle and London, 2002, pp 92-93; John Perry, ‘Cultural Currents in the Turko-Persian world of Safavid and Post-Safavid times’, in New Perspectives on Safavid Iran: Empire and Society, Colin Mitchell (ed.), Iranian Studies 8, Abingdon and New York, 2011, pp 84-96; Julie Scott Meisami, ‘The Šâh-nâme as Mirror for Princes: A Study in Reception’, in Pand-o sokhan: Mélanges offerts à Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, eds. Christophe Balaÿ et al., Bibliothèque iranienne 44, Tehran, 1995, pp 265-73. On the other hand, Priscilla Soucek and Filiz Çağman, ‘A Royal Manuscript and its Transformation: the Life of a Book’, in The Book and the Islamic World: the Written Word and Communication in the Middle East, George Atiyah (ed.), Albany NY, 1995, pp 179-208, is a salient study of how rival rulers appropriated earlier commissioned works by interpolation and insertions. A recent thematic examination is Charles Melville, ‘The Illustration of History in Safavid manuscript painting’, in Mitchell, op. cit., 2011, pp 163-97.

4. ‘The Creation of the Book’, in The Houghton Shahnameh, introduced and described by Stuart Cary Welch and Martin Bernard Dickson, vol. I, Cambridge MA, and London, 1981, p 3. Robert


Hillenbrand, ‘The Iconography of the Shāhnāma-yi Shāhī’, in Safavid Persia: the History and Politics of an Islamic Society, Charles Melville (ed.), Pembroke Persian Papers 4, London and New York, 1996, pp 53-78 is a seminal study departing from commonplace artistic analysis towards contextualizing its production, holistically and historically. Hillenbrand’s intensive scrutiny led him to conclude that the preponderance in it of martial, rather than romantic or fantastic images encountered all too often in other illustrated Shahnamas, is not coincidental. This was art of its time as Shah Tahmasp was engaged in defending Iran against Turanians or Uzbeks and Ottomans, as the project was underway. Two dissertations on the Houghton Shahnama are: Elizabeth Lara Hendee, ‘The Houghton Shah-Nameh’. Senior Thesis, Colorado College, 1990; Samantha Lauren, ‘Painted Interiors from the Houghton Shahnameh’. Master’s thesis, Florida State University, 2004. http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/32 3257/

5. Tahmasp never earned a good press from contemporary correspondents. This lord of the land was reputed to sell his disused garments in the bazaar. He possessed all the unsavoury attributes routinely ascribed to an oriental potentate for he was, justifiably, a temperamental tyrant who oscillated between profligate intemperance and dour abstinence. See Roger Savory, ‘Safavid Persia’, in The Cambridge History of Islam: the Central Islamic Lands from Pre-Islamic Times to the First World War, vol. 1A, P M Holt et al. (eds.), Cambridge, 1970; repr. 1994, p 404; idem, Iran under the Safavids, Cambridge 1980, repr. 2007, p 57; Vladimir Minorsky, ‘The Medieval Age’, in Roman Ghirshman et al., Persia: the Immortal Kingdom, Ramesh Sanghvi (ed.), London, 1971, p 141; Hans Roemer, ‘The Safavid Period’, in The Cambridge History of Iran: the Timurid and Safavid Periods, vol. 6, Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (eds.), Cambridge, 1986; repr. 2006, pp 248-50 is empathic compared to extant appraisals in secondary sources; Sheila Canby, ‘The World of the Early Safavids: Shah Tahmāsp at Qazvin 1550-76’, in Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran 1501-1576, Jon Thompson and Sheila Canby (eds.), Milan, 2003, pp 19, 22; Homa Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran, New Haven and London, 2009; repr. 2010, p 120f.; Soudavar, art. cit., 2002, p 103 also relates how his army subsisted without pay during the last fourteen years of his reign. Peter Avery, The Spirit of Iran: a History of Achievement from Adversity, Costa Mesa CA, 2007, p 563 notes that, at Tahmasp’s death, the treasury was bursting with bejewelled weapons, gold and silver bullion, and silk among other valuables. A ‘costly but unproductive hoard’ because between 1558 and 1571, five years before his death, the empire’s revenue had decline by ‘nearly half in cash receipts.’ David Blow, Shah Abbas: the ruthless king who became an Iranian legend, London and New York, 2009, pp 8-14, is a brisk and very readable overview of Tahmasp’s vita.

6. Recte its production dates ‘1522-35’ in Welch and Dickson, op. cit., 1981, vol. I, pp 3-7 and ff. Pointed out in Thompson and Canby, op. cit., 2003, p 84 and Sheila Canby, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp: the Persian Book of Kings, Philomena Mariani (ed.), New Haven and London, 2011, p 14, n 3; and eadem, ‘The Safavids’, in The Worlds of Islam in the collection of the Aga Khan Museum, Madrid, 2009, p 202. Savory, op. cit., 2007, p 59. Q.vv. Stuart Cary Welch, ‘The Shāhnāmeh of Shah Tahmasp’, in Treasures of Islam, Toby Falk (ed.), Geneva, 1985, pp 68-93; Ebadollah Bahari, Bihzad: Master of Persian Calligraphy, Annemarie Schimmel (foreword), London, 1997, pp 191-94; Sheila Canby, ‘Six illustrations from the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp’, in eadem, Princes, Poets & Paladins: Islamic and Indian Paintings from the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, London, 1998, pp 47-54. Encyclopædia Iranica, s.v. ‘Tahmāsp I’ (by Colin Mitchell), http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/tahmasp-i; Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. X, s.v. ‘Tahmāsp’ (by Roger Savory), pp 108-10; Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, vol. 2, s.v ‘Tahmasp I, Shah (1514-1576)’ (by Sholeh Quinn), Richard Martin (ed.), New York, 2004, p 675. An insightful psycho-social critique on him by a former pupil of Martin Dickson is in Kathryn Babayan, ‘Mirroring the Safavi Past: Shah Tahmasb’s break with His Messiah Father’, in eadem, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran, Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs XXXV, Cambridge, MA and London, 2002, pp 295-348; eadem, The Safavids in Iranian History (1501-1722)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History, Touraj Daryaee (ed.), Oxford, 2012; repr. 2014, pp 291-95, is a succinct evaluation of Tahmasp’s beliefs,


political and religious. (Brilliantly bristling with provocative aphorisms, that would be railed against as ‘reductive’ and ‘essentialist’ by the contemporary custodians of cant cornering Middle East history writing, is the chapter entitled ‘Persian Psychology’ in William Haas, Iran, New York, 1946, pp 116-36. It ought be mandatory reading for all embarking on studying or visiting Iran.) In his invaluable study, Abolala Soudavar, Art of the Persian Courts: Selections from the Art and History Trust Collection, Milo Cleveland Beach (contrib.), New York, 1992, pp 164 and 200, n 82 cites Munshi Budaq Qazvini, a contemporary chronicler, who mentioned in his Jawahir al-akhbar that a Shahnama ‘had taken twenty years for completion, beginning early in the reign of the late shāh when he had a liking for reading and writing, and calligraphers and painters were constantly in his presence.’ See Mohammad Faghfoory, ‘Jawahir al-akhbar: yek nuskhah-yi khatti-yi kamyab az mamaba‘-yi dawran-i safavi’, Iran Nameh XV, 4 [Gholam Hossein Sadighi: A Commemorative], 1997, pp 613-23.

7. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. IX, s.v. ‘Selim II’ (by Christine Woodhead), pp 131-32. Recte its wrong dimensions given as ‘47.5 x 32 cms’ in Iranian Masterpieces of Persian Painting [Shahkarha-yi nigargiri yi Iran], Claud Karbasi et al. (tr.), Anthony Schumacher (ed.), Tehran, 2005; repr. 2011, p 231. 31 full-page, colour miniatures of the Houghton Shahnama’s 118 illustrations, now back in Tehran, are reproduced here (pp 231-305).

8. The collector and art historian, Abolala Soudavar, after closely observing a particularly remarkable Qur’an put up for sale at Christie’s, London, in the winter of 1992, tantalizingly suggested it could well be the Qu’ran which complemented the Tahmaspi Shahnama. For his explication see Soudavar, ‘Appendix’ in art. cit., 2002, pp 110-11, 114-15, 120, n 77. Now also consult Abolala Soudavar, Reassessing Early Safavid Art and History: thirty-five years after Dickson & Welch 1981, Houston, 2016, which critique affords a defense of Dickson and Welch’s scholarship in the ensuing years.

9. Ibid. Also Stuart Cary Welch, A King’s Book of Kings: the Shah-nameh of Shah Tahmasp, London and New York 1972; repr. 1976, p 15; q.v. n 43. Further see the Sotheby’s catalogue, The Stuart Cary Welch Collection, Part One: Arts of the Islamic World, London, 6 April 2011, London, 2011, p 89 (hereinafter CWC, 2011). That ‘contemporary’ Shahnama, gifted by Shah Tahmasp, was as the one commissioned by Prince Baysunghur, a ‘Timuri bibliophile’, whose own fine copy had been executed in 1436. The Shah’s recension was assuredly predicated on a more than passing familiarity of several earlier ones including a ‘proto-Baysunghur Shahnama’ or ‘Baysunghur’s own copy’: a perceptive comment in Eleanor Sims, Peerless Images: Persian Painting and its Sources, with Boris Marshak and Ernst Grube, New Haven and London, 2003, p 64. It was the Baysunghuri Shahnama, or a magnificent near contemporaneous equivalent, which contained an introduction on the life of Firdawsi and a historical compilation of the epic. And this ‘Baysunghur Introduction’ was to be appended to subsequent copies of the Shahnama including the one presented to the Sultan, see Welch and Dickson, op. cit., 1981, vol. II, plates 1-3. It must be borne that Firdawsi’s final recension of 1010 was revised twice: first by Hamdullah al-Mustawfi al-Qazwini (1280/81-1339/40?) and again by expunging archaisms and augmenting verses for the Timurid prince, Baysunghur (1397-1433), and completed in January 1430. This is now the standard text. See Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, Epic Images and Contemporary History: the Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama, Chicago and London, 1980, p 1; further, it must also be pointed out that this ‘Baysunghur Introduction’ contains numerous misidentifications of historical personages alongside notations to the epic and epicist, Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. IV, s.v. ‘Bāysongorī Šāh-nāma’ (by Dj Khaleghi Motlagh and T Lentz), pp 9-11; Olga Davidson, ‘The Testing of the Shāhnāma in the “Life of Ferdowsī” Narratives’, The Rhetoric of Biography: Narrating Lives in Persianate Societies, L Marlow (ed.), Ilex Foundation Series 4, Boston and Washington DC, 2011, pp 11-20, esp. pp 15ff.; eadem, ‘Why is the Bāysonghori Recension a Recension?’, No Tapping Around Philology: a Festschrift in honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, Alireza Korangy and Daniel Sheffield (eds.), Wiesbaden, 2014, pp 127-30. The codex (= Gulistan ms. no. 716, dated A.H. Jumada I, 833/January, 1430]) containing 21 unsigned illuminations within 346 folios remains, thankfully, intact albeit inaccessible, since the 1978-79 revolution at the Gulistan Palace Museum


(former Royal Library), Tehran, unlike other mutilated Shahnamas elsewhere. Still unstudied, its images were reproduced as An Album of Miniatures and Illuminations from the Baysonghori Manuscript of the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi dated 833 A.H./1430 A.D. and preserved in the Imperial Library, Tehran, Basil Gray (introd. and commentary), Tehran, 1971. This commemorative edition of 3,000 copies was arranged by the Central Council of the Celebration of the 2500th Anniversary of the Founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. It was never offered for sale but gifted by the late Shah to heads of states attending the then festivities at Persepolis, October 1971. Its 34 colour plates are appalling water-colour copies as has been pointed out in Eleanor Sims, ‘The Illustrated Manuscripts of Firdausī’s “Shāhnāma” Commissioned by Princes of the House of Tīmūr’, Ars Orientalis 22, 1992, p 59, n 4; and Robert Hillenbrand, ‘Exploring a Neglected Masterpiece: the Gulistan Shahnama of Baysunghur’, Iranian Studies 43, 1, 2010 [Special issue: Millennium of the Shahnama of Firdausi, Firuza Abdullaeva and Charles Melville (eds.)], p 107f. who has done all a service by detailing how ‘at a time when the technology was in place for first-class color plates to be made, and when there was clearly no shortage of money, the decision was made not to photograph and reproduce the original paintings themselves, but to paint – presumably on the basis of photographic reproductions – water-color copies of them and to make the color plates from these modern copies rather than from the originals. … The procedure followed, whatever it was, is not acknowledged anywhere in the 1971 volume. In other words, the book is not what it pretends to be. It is as if a luxury modern edition of, say, Les Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry were to be produced by hiring some modern artist to out-Limburg the Limburg brothers, coloring the outlines of their composition, and then passing off his work as a photographic record of the real thing. The lack of respect for the original is startling.’ Hillenbrand has also done the decent thing by pointing out that Basil Gray had not been in the know and, if anything, deceived by the Persian imperial celebrations council thus leading him to state that the miniatures were ‘reproduced in facsimile from the original’ (p 107, n 36). Recte A Shahpur Shahbazi, Ferdowsi: a critical biography, Cambridge MA, 1991; repr. Costa Mesa CA, 2010, p 17, n 68 who declared it as ‘magnificently published’ as the Houghton Shahnama and published in ‘1976’. A caveat emptor then to the prospective bibliophile is that this tome is intrinsically worthless and yet able to command an asking price of almost £400 from antiquarian book-sellers. A garish reprint, exactly two decades later to mark the epic’s millennial composition, ought elicit no more than bibliographic notice: Majmu‘ah-yi minyaturha va safahat-i muzahhab-i Shahnama-yi Firdawsi: nuskhah-yi dawrah-yi Baysunghuri [The Shahnameh of Ferdosi: the Baysonghori Period Manuscript], illust. by Karim Safai; Jaber Anasseri (introd. and notes), Tehran, 1991. All 21 illustrations have now been finely reproduced in a difficult to obtain coffee-table tome, Iranian Masterpieces of Persian Painting [Shahkarha-yi nigargiri yi Iran], Claud Karbasi et al. (tr.), Anthony Schumacher (ed.), Tehran, 2005; repr. 2011, plates 41-67. This hefty catalogue, both in weight and price, accompanied an exhibition curated by Mohammad Ali Rajabi during spring 2005 at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Some of its illustrations were previously reproduced as full-colour transparencies in Mohammad-Hasan Semsar, Golestan Palace Library: a Portfolio of Miniature Paintings and Calligraphy [Kakh-i Gulistan, ganjinah-i kutub va nafa’is-i khatti: guzinah’i az shahkarha-yi nigargiri va khvushnivisi], Karim Emami (tr. and ed.), Tehran, 2000, pp 86-109. It was a limited edition catalogue of that former imperial library’s illuminated holdings.

10. David Roxburgh, The Persian Album: from Dispersal to Collection, New Haven and London, 2005; repr. 2013, p 317. Kathryn Babayan, op. cit., 2002, p 326. Roxburgh’s writings, in shifting from descriptions towards ruminations on the interface between production and reception, artists and patrons, and epistemologies of exchange, patronage and cultural norms compel rethinking. Also see idem, ‘The Study of Painting and the Arts of the Book’, Muqarnas 17, 2000, pp 1-16; idem, ‘Micrographia: towards a visual logic of Persianate painting’, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics [Special issue: Islamic Arts] 43, 2003[2004], pp 12-30. In similar vein is a perspicacious Stand der Forschung in Anna Contadini, ‘The Manuscript as a Whole’, in Arab Painting: Text and Image in Illustrated Arabic Manuscripts, Handbook of Oriental Studies I.90, Leiden, 2007; corr. rev. ed., 2010, pp 3-16. Perceptive and profitable is Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, ‘The Mirage


of Islamic Art: Reflections on the study of an unwieldy field’, The Art Bulletin 85, 1, 2003, pp 152-84. It would be remiss to overlook Ehsan Yarshater who, almost half a century ago, urged an unitary reconsideration of the visual and verbal in Persian poetics and painting by distinguishing literary topoi as harmony and sensuality. See his ‘Some Common Characteristics of Persian Poetry and Art’, Studia Islamica XVI, 1962, pp 61-71 and idem, ‘Persian Poetry and Painting: Common Features’, in Proceedings, the IVth International Congress of Persian Art and Archaeology, Part A, April 24 – May 3, 1960. A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present, vol. XIV, Arthur U Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (eds.), Tokyo, London and New York, 1967, pp. 3125-29. On the presentation of gifts see Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. X, s.v ‘Gift giving iv. In the Safavid period’ (by Rudi Matthee), pp 609-14; and, generally, Michael Morony, ‘Gift giving in the Iranian tradition’, in Gifts of the Sultan: the arts of giving at the Islamic Courts, Linda Komaroff (ed.), New Haven and London, 2011, pp 32-49. The question of ‘knowledge transactions’, as propounded by Lisa Jardine, in her analysis of late Elizabethan humanists, where versatile scholars served their sixteenth-century patrons as tutor, secretary and chaplain, hold promising potential for researchers of Muslim material culture. Such transactions or negotiations between savant and sovereign, not entirely predicated on pre-arranged pecuniary practices, can be based on the proferring of expertise towards textual or artistic support for a political or strategic outcome. Examined in Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in honour of Patrick Collinson, Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Cambridge, 1994; repr. 2006, pp 102-24. In her survey, Lale Uluç, ‘The Shahnama of Firdawsī as an Illustrated Text’, in Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum: Arts of the Book and Calligraphy, Carol LaMotte and Shannon de Viviès (tr.), Margaret Graves (ed.), Istanbul, 2010, p 263 points out that the Shahnama was explicitly minuted in Ottoman archival lists and gift registers whereas other illustrated books went unnamed and enumerated as presents to the Porte. When accompanied by a Qur’an, the latter was listed prior to the Shahnama; and chancery chroniclers who would subsume other painted tomes under a collective header regularly recorded both in every instance. Also discussed in eadem, ‘The Shahnama of Firdausi in the Lands of Rum’, in Shahnama Studies II: The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama, Charles Melville and Gabrielle van den Berg (eds.), Studies in Persian Cultural History 2, Leiden, 2012, pp 161-62. The question of an Alid Qur’an brings to mind the iconographic parallels between the paintings in the Shahnama, especially those of the Rustam cycle, with those in the Khavarannama, a narrative by Ibn Husam (1379/80-1468?) extolling Ali’s exploits in a Persianised folk religious setting, the very converse of its Firdawsian one. See Charles Melville, ‘Ibn Husam’s Hāvarān-nāma and the Šāh-nāma of Firdausī’, in Liber Amicorum: Études sur l’Iran médiéval et moderne offertes à Jean Calmard, M Bernardini et al. (eds.), Eurasian Studies 5, 1-2, 2006[2007], pp 219-34. Redolent with Alid predestinarian overtones is the illustration, ‘Ship of Shi‘ism’ (folio 18v.) – the very first among the 78 Houghton gifted to the Met (1970.300.1) – which depicts the ahl al-bayt (‘people of the House’), namely, Muhammad, Ali, Hasan, and Husain who, along with Firdawsi, are saved from the deluge till the end of time. Firdawsi, according to some sources a Shi‘i, is unequivocally portrayed as one, along with the Muhammedan quartet and the Safavids, as vanguards of the faith. The parable of the ship of fidelity is a recurrent theme in visual and literary media. Its inclusion by Tahmasp for the allegorical edification of his Sunni counterpart cannot be ruled out of hand. See Raya Shani, ‘Noah’s Ark and the Ship of Faith in Persian Painting’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 27, 2002, p 181; and Colin Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric, Tauris Academic Studies-BIPS Persian Studies Series 1, London and New York, 2009, p 74. Duncan Haldane, ‘Twin Spirits: Angels and Devils Portrayed in Shah Tahmasp’s Shah Nameh’, in Proceedings of the Colloquium on Paradise and Hell in Islam, Keszthely, 7-14 July 2002, K Dévényi and A Fodor (eds.), The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic 30, pt. 2, Budapest, 2012, pp 39-53 descries ancient Zoroastrian doctrines in illustrations of the Houghton Shahnama.

11. Not just upstarts but downright ‘drunken cowards’ is how Tahmasp’s forebear and founder of the Safavid state, Shah Ismail I (d. 1524), and his army is depicted and described in the Selimname written for Sultan Selim I (r. 1512-20) by Şükri-i Bidlisi, who thinks nothing of making Ismail


acknowledge that, ‘Osman is the shah of the world. We do not deserve to be called shah.’ Noted in Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ, ‘The Depiction of Ceremonies in Ottoman Miniatures: Historical Record or a Matter of Protocol?’, Muqarnas 27, 2010, p 253.

12. Soudavar, op. cit., 1992, p 164. Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. I, s.v ‘Peace of Amasya’ (by M Köhbach), p 928; recte Savory, art. cit., 1994, p 405 because the treaty did not usher in ‘a period of over thirty years of peace with the Ottomans.’ It held for twenty. On the treaty’s renegotiation, Savory, op. cit., 2007, p 67 and Kaveh Farrokh, Iran at War: 1500-1988, Oxford, 2011, p 47. Soudavar, art. cit., 2002, pp 105 and 118, n 56, relates how Budaq Qazvini, revealed the mindset of Tahmasp’s successor, Ismail II, desperate to maintain the cold peace, who sent his Sunni nemesis, Murad III (r. 1574-95), ‘fifty illustrated manuscripts copied by unrivaled master-calligraphers, not one of which could be found in the Ottoman sultan’s library. Even though [his cousin] Ebrahim Mirza impertinently repeated that such manuscripts were irreplaceable and that [the Ottomans] could not appreciate their value or their beauty, and that other items should be sent instead, [the shah] replied, ‘I need peace and security, not books and manuscripts, that I never read or see.’ This from a keen poet. A half-century on, Shah Abbas (r. 1588-1629) proposed yet another armistice in 1610, which the Ottomans accepted in 1618, based on that agreed at Amasya, but including a hundred loads of silk to sweeten the deal. Halil İnalcik, ‘The Heyday and Decline of the Ottoman Empire’, in Holt et al. op. cit., 1994, p 339.

13. A point in fact noted at the outset of a catalogue, with a description of this Tahmaspi Shahnama, on the tradition of giving and receiving presents in the Islamic oecumene. See Linda Komaroff, ‘The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts’, in eadem, The Gift Tradition in Islamic Art/Taqalid al-ihda’ fi’l-funun al-islamiyah, Los Angeles, 2012, pp 13-15. This is an abridged, bi-lingual edition of the catalogue published a year earlier, supra n 10. Further, generally, Jan Schmidt, ‘The Reception of Firdausi’s Shahnama among the Ottomans’, and Zeren Tanındı, ‘The Illustration of the Shahnama and the Art of the Book in Ottoman Turkey’, in Melville and van den Berg, op. cit., 2012, pp 121-39; 141-58. (Recte Houghton’s death of ‘1991’ to 1990 in Schmidt, art. cit., 2012, p 125, n 36.) Also Emine Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court, Bloomington, 2013, pp 78-80. This presentation by Tahmasp’s entourage was exactly reproduced in a double-folio painting in Seyyed Lokman’s Şehname-yi Selim Han (Topkapı Library A.3595, fol. 53v-54r) prepared for Murad III in 1581, as noted in J Michael Rogers, tr., exp. and ed., The Topkapı Saray Museum 2: the Albums and Illuminated Manuscripts, from the original Turkish by Filiz Çağman and Zeren Tanındı, London, 1986, pp 211-12, cat. no. 157; Rüstem, art. cit., 2012, pp 246-47 (infra n 19 for full reference); and Sheila Blair, Text and Image in Medieval Persian Art, Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lectures 6, SOAS-Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art, Edinburgh, 2014, p 157. It was exhibited for the 2009 ‘Turkey-Iran Culture Year’ organised in collaboration with Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency, alongside some 300 artefacts at the imperial stables of the Topkapı Palace Museum, December 2, 2009 - February 5, 2010. See Onbin Yıllık Iran Medeniyeti: Ikbin Yıllık Ortak Miras, Selmin Kangal (ed.), [Istanbul], [2009], pp 203, 305. Eng. edn., Ten thousand years of Iranian civilization: two thousand years of Common Heritage, Selmin Kangal and Drew Batchelder (eds.), [Istanbul, 2009]. ‘10,000 Years of Iran’s Civilizations [sic] glitters at Topkapi Palace’, Tehran Times, December 2 2009, p 16. Mazhar Ipşiroğlu, Masterpieces from the Topkapı Museum: Painting and Miniatures, Adair Mill (tr.), London, 1980, pp 113-14 reminds one that while the sultan’s versifiers imitated Firdawsi by bombastically titling their compositions as Şehin Şehname or Şehname, his artists eschewed pretentious or fantastic portrayals for consistently showing him as sovereign and head of state. This was in consonance with Ottoman visual conventions that favoured simplicity over sensuousness, an autonomous feature of Ottoman book illustration, notwithstanding its Persian antecedents. The Süleymanname was formally, conspicuously, and conceptually based on Firdawsi’s Shahnama as it too consisted of 30,000 verses in the masnavi genre and mutaqarib metre. See Esin Atıl, Süleymanname: the Illustrated History of Süleyman the Magnificent, Washington DC and New York, 1986, p 63; and Ciğdem Kafescioğlu, ‘The visual arts’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey: the Ottoman Empire as a world power 1453-1603, vol. 2, Suraiya Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (eds.), Cambridge, 2012,


p 508. An aside here is that Cornell Fleischer, a protégé of Martin Dickson, is currently the University of Chicago’s Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies, a chair named in honour of that sixteenth-century sultan and partially funded by Ankara.

14. Adolphus Slade, ‘A Lesson in Pride (1833)’, in A Middle Eastern Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History, Bernard Lewis (sel. and presented), New York, 2001, p 156. In a finely-crafted assessment, Peter Avery, ‘Empires of Islam: Muslim India, Persia and Turkey’, in The Age of Expansion: Europe and the World 1559-1600, Hugh Trevor-Roper (ed.), London, 1968, p 306, states: ‘War between the two states was inevitable, and the sectarian difference gave it a religious warrant: the rulers could demand internal unity, here against the “Sunnite dog”, there against the “Shi‘ite heretic”. The Prophet’s mantle and banner were shown to the Ottoman armies ready to march from Istanbul to the Persian frontier, while Persian armies setting out to seize Tiflis or Baghdad invoked the spirit of ‘Ali and cursed those first three Caliphs of Islam who had kept him from his legitimate position as the Prophet’s successor.’ Rula Jurdi Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire, International Library of Iranian Studies 1, London and New York, 2004 is an important, recent analysis of this transitional period. Thorough going on the whole question is also Colin Turner, Islam without Allah? The Rise of Religious Externalism in Safavid Iran, Richmond, 2000; repr. New York and Abingdon, 2014. But in Safavid Persia ‘the perceived history of persecution suffered by the Shi‘a did not always prompt a sensitivity to the vulnerability of other minorities once the Shi‘a became the dominant sect.’ Michael Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind, A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day, London 2007; repr. 2008, p 140. In the best tradition of English generalists, with perspicacity frequently wanting among specialists, wrote Clive Irving, Crossroads of Civilization: 3000 years of Persian History, London, 1978; repr. 1979, pp 166ff.: ‘Persia’s emergence as a new and independent branch of eastern Islam was not, like the rise of Protestant Europe, intellectually liberating. Shi‘ism was no longer a revolutionary or even revisionary force: it became an intensively traditional one, bent on consecrating the fable of ‘Ali and Husain, the martyred imams, through rituals like the tazieh passion plays which had overtones of genocide in their liturgy, and through the pilgrimages to the shrines of the Shi‘a imams. And the secular climate was no more radical. Isfahan in the seventeenth century did foster a period of intellectual debate; it revolved around theological philosophy of great sophistication but there was little sign of the kind of intellectual questing that had distinguished Baghdad or Nishapur when Persian brilliance sharpened the dialectic of all Islam. There was no equal of Avicenna, the great philosopher and “universal genius” of the Samanid court, whose influence reached twelfth-century Europe, nor of the scientist al-Biruni. That calibre of secular exploration had been snuffed out in the petrification of Islamic thinking, just as it was in Europe by the reaction of the thirteenth-century Papacy.’ The farther back you look, the farther forward you can see: Roger Savory, ‘Islam and democracy: the case of the Islamic republic of Iran’, in The Islamic World from Classical to Modern Times: Essays in honor of Bernard Lewis, C E Bosworth et al. (eds.), Princeton, 1989, pp 827ff. convincingly delineates how the 1979 revolution led to a theocracy, not democracy, because ‘[t]he Islamic republic of Iran is, by virtue of its own internal dynamics, a totalitarian state.’ The longue durée enables one to observe the gestation of intolerance and bigotry within the Persian Shi‘a, since the zealous imposition and identification of that credo from the sixteenth century onwards, with Perso-Safavid nationalism. It did not emerge, howsoever much generous credence be accorded, to a century of western meddling and mendacity, pace Stephen Kinzer and Christopher de Bellaigue in their harlot-histories precipitated by multicultural shibboleths. A reading of Savory, loc. cit., would have led them to realise how ‘the accommodation eventually reached among Sunnis between the theory and practice of government in medieval Islam was never reached, or even attempted, in the Ithnā ‘asharī Shī‘i tradition.’ Both bien-pensant journalists are serious reading – masterfully disparaged by the Leavises as the ‘literary racket’ – for those who have nailed their colours to the mast of anti-Americanism fluttering as responsible penmanship. Sheila Canby, ‘The Legacy of Shah ‘Abbas’, in eadem, Shah ‘Abbas: the remaking of Iran, London, 2009, p 254, correctly concludes that ‘Safavid support of madrasas around the shrine in Qum helped establish the city’s position as a centre of learning, while its geographic location between Isfahan and Tehran has enabled it to function as a bridge between the old capitals


of the Safavids and the new one of the Qajars, Pahlavis and Islamic republic during the past two centuries. After the Revolution of 1979 both Mashhad and Qum experience renewed prominence, and images of the shrines began to appear on Iranian banknotes with pictures of protestors carrying banners with the face of Ayatollah Khomeini on the reverse.’ Amnesia and appeasement punctuated the reviews of this exhibition on Shah ‘Abbas outstandingly curated by Sheila Canby at The British Museum, London (February 19 - June 14, 2009). The ‘literary racket’ was manifest in idiocy on both the right and left of the ‘quality’ press: Madeleine Bunting, ‘Empire of the Mind’, The Guardian Review, January 31 2009, pp 16-17, was left awestruck because ‘Abbas was gracious enough to accommodate the [forcibly evicted] Armenians that he even allowed them to even build their own Christian cathedral’ for ‘[i]n stark contrast to the disciplined aesthetic of the mosques, the cathedral’s walls are rich with gory martyrdoms and saints.’ But Miss Bunting is clearly at a loss to put out either buntings or sentinels when declaring, with half-naïve puzzlement, ‘Shia rituals of self-flagellation, intercession, pilgrimage, relics and martyrs can alienate in a Europe that is rapidly forgetting its own version of such rituals in the Catholic tradition.’ Inconvenient to point out how a Carmelite prior wrote the Pope that Shah ‘Abbas was ‘the greatest tyrant the Church has had since it began … for the methods he adopts are taken from hell.’ 5,000 Christians were forcibly converted to Shia Islam. David Blow, op. cit., 2009, p 125. Neville Hawcock, ‘Show of might and tolerance,’ Financial Times, February 20 2009, p 13 is another ignoramus according to whom it stands to reason that with the magnificent objects on display ‘one gets the impression of a tolerant, outward-looking culture.’ (Try publishing that very conclusion after being amazed by the goldwork or temple architecture of the Aztecs.) A balanced corrective is Michael Glover, ‘ Exotic riches of an Iranian tyrant,’ The Independent, March 5 2009, p 16: ‘The national religion, a brand of Islam called Shia, was a relatively recent imposition.’ And that the Shah’s ‘iron fist guaranteed devotion to Allah in others, and that was what he sought.’ Far and away more disappointing is the then British Museum director, Neil MacGregor, admirable as his enthusiasm and industry has been in undertaking curatorial exchanges with Iran, China, and Sudan among other culturally rich but revolting regimes, to declare that, unlike Tudor England, ‘the Shah’s Iran “accommodated other faiths” as seen by gospels beautifully illustrated by Armenian Christians who were forcibly resettled in Iran from 1603’ for entirely commercial reasons. One swallow made that Scotsman’s summer, it seems, and an astucious despot can be rehabilitated as an altruist. William Lee Adams, ‘The Art of Diplomacy’, Time, March 2, 2009, p 50. Robert Hillenbrand, regrettably posits in an otherwise learned review, ‘Wealth, piety and panache: how Safavid flamboyance redefined Iran’, Times Literary Supplement, May 8 2009, p 17 that Safavid Persia ushered in ‘a tolerance hitherto rarely encountered in Iran’ and was ‘a multiracial society, welcoming Armenians, Georgians, Hindus and Westerners, including members of religious orders.’ Present-day Qatar, UAE and other Persian Gulf shaykhdoms attract all of the aforementioned and others without whose skills and talent such Arab societies would halt in minutes. Just how truly tolerant they are need not be rehearsed. Like Hillenbrand, Roger Savory, ‘Land of the Lion and the Sun’, in The World of Islam: Faith, People, Culture, Bernard Lewis (ed.), London, 1976; corr. repr. 2002, p 247 also succumbed to this fallacy by conflating politic accommodation with spiritual magnanimity as ‘he created a climate of religious tolerance which encouraged foreign merchants to live and work in Iran’. None of them have delved into the harrowing ordeal of Armenian Christians endured by the Armenians as Edmund Herzig, ‘The Deportation of the Armenians and Europe’s myth of Shah ‘Abbas I’, in Pembroke Papers 1: Persian and Islamic Studies in honour of P W Avery, Charles Melville (ed.), Cambridge, 1990, pp 59-71, which conclusion (p 71) merits rehearsal: ‘On balance the usual European interpretation of ‘Abbās’s relations with the Armenians appears sadly distorted by the exclusive focus on the Julfans, by the disregard for the human cost of his successful military strategy, and by the urge to make every aspect of his reign conform with the image of him as a great and good king. … Far from being the father of the Armenians, ‘Abbās thoroughly earned the epithet, “the second Timur”, given him by an Armenian scribe in 1606.’ Overlooked also is Vera Moreen, ‘The Status of Religious Minorities in Safavid Iran, 1617-1661’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies XL, 2, 1981, pp 119-34 which throws light on the plight of all non-Muslim subjects of the Safavids. This grew out of Moreen’s 1978 Harvard doctoral dissertation which


focused on the continuous persecution and forcible mass conversion of Jews during ‘Abbas I’s reign and that of his successors, Safi I (r. 1629-42) and ‘Abbas II (r. 1642-66). Eadem, Iranian Jewry’s hour of peril and heroism: a study of Bābāī ibn Lutf’s Chronicle, 1617-1662, Text and Studies 6, New York, 1987. Mahan Esfahani, a noted harpsichordist, challenged Robert Hillenbrand in a letter, Times Literary Supplement, May 29 2009, p 6 stating, ‘it is generally acknowledged that religious diversity and tolerance were cornerstones of Persian history dating back to the Achaemenid period (559-330 BC).’ On religious intolerance during Shah ‘Abbas’s reign towards all minorities see David Blow, op. cit., 2009, passim and Mary Boyce, ‘Under Safavids and Mughals’, in eadem, Zoroastrians: their religious beliefs and practices, Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices, London, 1979; corr. repr. 2001, pp 177-95. Boyce, comparatively if unwittingly, affords an excellent evaluation of these beleaguered believers belonging to Sunni and Shi‘a empires of late medieval Islam. On Safavid persecution of Zoroastrians also see Jenny Rose, ‘Gabr-Mahalle: Zoroastrians in Islamic Iran’, in eadem, Zoroastrianism: an Introduction, I B Tauris Introduction to Religions, London and New York, 2011, pp 175ff.; and Rashna Writer, ‘Emasculation of the Zoroastrians in the Safavid Era’, in eadem, The Reshaping of Muslim Iran: from Zoroastrian to Muslim, Jamsheed Choksy (foreword), Lampeter, 2013, pp 293-332. Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. I, s.v. ‘‘Abbās I’ (by Roger Savory), pp 7-8.

15. Welch and Dickson, op. cit., 1981, vol. I, p 3, and Appendix II, p 270. Joseph von Hammer[-Purgstall] (1774-1856) summarized it in his work based on official Ottoman lists translated into Italian and also that of memoirs and despatches by Europeans. See his Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches …, vol. 3, Pest, 1828; repr. Graz, 1963, pp 517-22. It is mentioned for the first time in a 1568 description of the 1566 enthronement of Selim II by the bureaucrat, Feridun Ahmed Beg (d. 1581), in his compilation, Nüzhet-i esrārü’l-ahyār der ahbār-ı Sefer-i Sigetvar (‘Joyful Chronicle of the Szigetvár Campaign’), dated A.H. 13 Rajab, 976 (= 1 January, 1569). Filiz Çağman and Zeren Tanındı, ‘Remarks on some Manuscripts from the Topkapi Palace Treasury in the Context of Ottoman-Safavid Relations’, Muqarnas 17, 2000, p 144, n 1; Tanındı, art. cit., 2012, p 151, n 52. Different figures are noted in Rogers, op. cit., 1986, p 211 as to the entourage consisting of 700 men and 19,000 pack beasts. Described also in Soudavar, op. cit., 1992, p 164.

16. Stuart Cary Welch, Jr ‘Two Shahs, Some Miniatures and a Boston Carpet’, Boston Museum Bulletin LXIX, 355-356, 1971, [Special issue: Persian Carpet Symposium], p 10. The shamsa categorically reads as executed for the library of Shah Tahmasp. Welch and Dickson, op. cit., 1981, vol. I, p 4; contra in the review by Priscilla Soucek, Ars Orientalis 14, 1984, p 133 and Michael Levey, ‘The very rich hours of the Shah’, The New York Review of Books, Oct. 7 1982, p 14. (Additional reviews cited infra n 23.) In agreement with Welch is Rüstem, art. cit., 2012, p 245 (vide n 19 for full citation) and Hillenbrand, art. cit., 1996, p 75, n 36. Eleanor Sims, op. cit., 2003, p 63 and Canby, op. cit., 2011, p 14 eschew spe